Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos nmav@gnutls.org writes:
I thought the GPL part applies only to the parts that are GPL and not to the whole library.
The manual says the following:
Nettle is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) (see the file COPYING for details). However, most of the individual files are dual licensed under less restrictive licenses like the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), or are in the public domain. This means that if you don't use the parts of nettle that are GPL-only, you have the option to use the Nettle library just as if it were licensed under the LGPL. To find the current status of particular files, you have to read the copyright notices at the top of the files.
Things will get simpler once the serpent code is replaced.
In any case would you suggest gnutls using nettle a la lsh, i.e. include it as a static library? That way we can eliminate licensing issues by removing the GPL parts.
My understanding is that as long as gnutls doesn't use the serpent code (the only remaining GPL-only feature) and has no references to it, it's ok no matter if you use static or dynamic linking. You can pretend that the serpent code was never built and included into the library.
Regards, /Niels